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1 the African Storybook and Language Teacher Identity In 1 The African Storybook and Language Teacher Identity in Digital Times ESPEN STRANGER–JOHANNESSEN University of British Columbia BONNY NORTON University of British Columbia <A>ABSTRACT The African Storybook (ASb) is a digital initiative that promotes multilingual literacy for African children by providing openly licenced children’s stories in multiple African languages, as well as English, French, and Portuguese. Based on Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of identity and investment, and drawing on the Douglas Fir Group framework for SLA (2016), this study investigates Ugandan primary school teachers’ investment in the ASb, its impact on their teaching, and their changing identities. The study was conducted in a rural Ugandan school from June to December 2014, and the data, which focuses on one key participant, Monica, were drawn from field notes, classroom observations, interview transcripts, and questionnaires, which were coded using retroductive coding. The findings indicate that through the ASb initiative and its stories, Monica and other teachers began to imagine themselves as writers, readers, and teachers of stories, reframing what it means to be a reading teacher. Teachers’ shifts of identity were indexical of their enhanced social and cultural capital as they engaged with the ASb, notwithstanding ideological constraints associated with mother tongue usage, assessment practices, and teacher supervision. The authors conclude that the enhancement of language teacher identity has important implications for the promotion of multilingual literacy for young learners in African communities. <END OF ABSTRACT> Keywords: teacher identity; investment; technology; Uganda; multilingual literacy; education When I see my name in there [online], ah! [excited] I’ll be very happy. I wanted my name to appear such that people, people come, I mean, people begin to look for me. Who is this woman who writes this story? But when they reach here they will want to know who Monica is. (Monica, Interview, November 27, 2014) Monica is one of 12 primary school teachers who were part of a study on the African Storybook (ASb) initiative at Arua Hill Primary School (henceforth Arua Hill) in northwestern Uganda. The school was one of the ASb’s pilot sites, and its teachers were invited to use digital stories from the ASb website (http://www.africanstorybook.org/) in their teaching. Hundreds of children’s stories are now freely available in multiple African languages, as well as English, French, and Portuguese. Teachers can also contribute their own stories to the database, available not only in Uganda, but in other African countries, as well as the international community. Such stories can be projected on classroom walls using laptops, or other mobile devices, and battery-operated projectors. Monica was excited to see her name on the ASb website, as a writer and poet, in a poem about mosquitos, in both Lugbarati, her mother tongue (“Yiyia”), and English (“Mosquito, Mosquito”). It is clear from the opening vignette that the ASb initiative expanded the range of identities available to Monica in her community; “people begin to look for me,” she said. Her 2 participation in this initiative generated curiosity in her community, not only about the multilingual stories on the website, but the creators of the stories. Of central interest in this article is the extent to which the ASb is implicated in identity changes for the teachers who engage with the initiative, and the attendant implications for the increased use of multilingual digital stories for the development of children’s literacy in poorly resourced African communities. Our interest extends not only to the practical possibilities and limitations of using digital children’s stories in African contexts, but what the research offers in terms of theoretical contributions to contemporary understandings of language teacher identity. To this end, we draw on Monica as a case study, while locating her data in the wider study, and we use Darvin and Norton’s (2015) model of identity and investment as a theoretical framework. Our specific research questions are as follows: RQ1. To what extent was Monica invested in the African Storybook? RQ2. How does her investment provide insight into her identity as a language teacher? RQ3. What are the implications of Monica’s investment for classroom practice? We begin the article with an introduction to the ASb and the Ugandan context in which the research took place. We then present our conceptual framework, locating it within a review of research on digital literacy initiatives in the African context, and the implications of this literature for our research project. We then turn to an analysis and discussion of our data, focussing on Monica’s investment with respect to the constructs of identity, capital, and ideology, and the implications of our findings for language teacher identity theory and classroom practice. Our analysis incorporates insights from the Douglas Fir Group (DFG) framework of second language acquisition, which incorporates identity and investment at the meso level, and seeks to “contribute useful knowledge for the improvement of education and instruction of any and all languages, including English with its special status as a global language” (DFG, 2016, p. 22). <A> THE AFRICAN STORYBOOK AND THE RESEARCH CONTEXT The 2013/2014 Education for All Global Monitoring Report (UNESCO, 2014) draws on an extensive body of research to outline the educational challenges facing sub-Saharan Africa, including the concern that over a third of children do not reach Grade 4, and that over half of those who do reach Grade 4 are not learning basic reading skills. Such findings, contextualized in a range of recent research in language education (e.g., Bamgbose, 2014; McIlwraith, 2014; Norton, 2014; Romaine, 2013), present an image of crowded classrooms, lost educational opportunity, gender disparities, and urban/rural divides, with a major problem identified as the scarcity of reading materials in African schools, particularly in local languages (Altinyelken, 2010a; Magara & Batambuze, 2009). Conventional publishing models, which rely on economies of scale, are unable to provide sufficient numbers or variety of books in the multitude of languages on the African continent (Welch & Glennie, 2017). Reading materials in schools and libraries, such as textbooks and storybooks, are essential for providing children with adequate exposure to text, especially in places where there are few print materials available outside school. Many teachers attempt to address this challenge by making wall charts, word cards, and other resources, but these materials are limited in that they cannot match books in scope or complexity. Books found in African schools and libraries are often donated (sometimes discarded) from Western countries, reflecting foreign curricula, themes, and imagery (Dent & Yannotta, 3 2005; Rubagumya, 2009; Waruingi, 2009). However, the market for children’s storybooks in Africa, particularly in African languages, is small, partly for economic and political reasons (Opoku–Amankwa, Edu–Buandoh, & Brew–Hammond, 2014; Parry, Andema, & Tumusiime, 2005), and partly because many languages have few speakers. Such reading challenges are well known in the Ugandan context, the site of our research, where there is a drastic shortage of appropriate stories for early reading in languages familiar to young children (Abiria, Early, & Kendrick, 2013; Ssentanda, 2014). Not only are such texts important for the development of literacy in the mother tongue, but also serve as the foundation for the development of literacy in other languages (Cummins, 2006), a very important consideration in a country of 37 million people, where English is the official language and over 40 African languages are spoken (Lewis, 2009). To help address this acute educational and social challenge in Africa, the innovative African Storybook initiative, launched in 2013 by the South African Institute for Distance Education (Saide), seeks to promote multilingual literacy for young African children through the provision of open access digital stories in multiple African languages, as well as English, French, and Portuguese, which are official languages on the African continent. The ASb has a powerful interactive website, and more than 600 stories have been developed for the three pilot countries of Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, as well as over a dozen other African countries, which are freely available for download, translation, and adaptation. Further, new stories can be written and uploaded by teachers, parents, librarians, and other community members. In the pilot countries there are a total of 14 pilot sites, predominantly primary schools, which are given support to experiment with the website and report on their experience of using, writing, and translating stories. The first author of this article, Espen Stranger–Johannessen, has done much research and service for the ASb, while the second author, Bonny Norton, is the ASb research advisor. As noted by Welch, Tembe, Wepukhulu, Baker, and Norton (2014), one of the central questions that the ASb addresses is: “How do we support teachers, parents and communities to use stories effectively for multilingual literacy development?” (p. 93). Research indicates that in the three pilot countries, teacher education programs give very little attention to teaching early grade reading, particularly in African languages (Abiria et al., 2013; Kyeyune et al., 2011). If reading
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